As a Carnegie-classified national doctoral research institution, Rowan University is renowned for their research expertise and exploration of groundbreaking innovations that could improve and advance society. With many competitive grant awards, Rowan continues to promote research activity both on campus and throughout the community. Along with an esteemed group of research advocates, Dr. Tabbetha Dobbins, Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, Rowan University, aims to address the challenge of building cyberinfrastructure (CI) and effectively supporting the diverse computational needs of Rowan’s students and faculty. To help advance this initiative, the group was recently awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) Planning Grant.
The project, known as the CC* Planning: Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Teaching and Research at Rowan University and the Southern New Jersey Region, will focus on strategic planning that creates a coordinated approach to informing the community of the latest CI developments, enables partnerships between institutions, and assists Rowan in building shared and accessible CI. “This grant gives us an opportunity to write a 5-year cyberinfrastructure plan using information from our own campuses and from Edge and their partners,” says Dobbins, the project’s Principal Investigator.
“When I first became vice president, Dr. Forough Ghahramani was such a valuable resource and shared information about CC* grant opportunities,” explains Dobbins. “We decided on this grant and joined forces with three co-Principal Investigators including, Dr. David Klassen, Professor and Chair of College of Science and Mathematics; Dr. Nidhal Bouaynaya, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies; and Dr. Mira Lalovic-Hand, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. Our partner institutions are Rowan College at Burlington County (RCBC), Rowan College of South Jersey (RCSJ), and Stockton University. This project really began with Dr. Ghahramani and she was able to expand the list of potential resources, like the Eastern Regional Network (ERN), that Rowan could tap into as we develop our plan. Dr. Lalovic-Hand and her team have also been a committed part of the project since its inception from the grant writing stage, all the way through to the workshops and collecting feedback from presenters and participants.”
Creating an Effective CI Strategy
The awarded Rowan CC* Planning Grant will invest in coordinated campus-level networking and CI improvement, innovation, integration, and engineering for science applications and distributed research projects. The project has three distinct components to create a thorough and effective CI strategy: a survey, a focus group, and education. “Our goal is to be a regional service to all computational researchers in the region,” explains Dobbins. “We want to begin by surveying our researchers and the Division of Information Resources & Technology (IRT) to better understand what their needs and perceptions are of our current cyberinfrastructure. The focus group will then allow a deeper dive into that survey. We will meet with the stakeholders—the researchers, faculty, and students—and the university-level administration. We will also gather input from the support group inside the IRT to gain a clear picture of their vision for the cyberinfrastructure plan.”
For the education component, the group will be inviting speakers from Rutgers who currently have a research cluster to discuss their projects and the resources available. “We realize our high-performance computing (HPC) is quite outdated and we have researchers working on their own home-built clusters, with minimal use of our campus-wide HPC,” explains Dobbins. “There are other developments that have come along to help researchers with their projects, including cloud-based services. One of our speakers spoke to faculty and students about the Cyberteam to Advance Research and Education in Eastern Regional Schools (CAREERS). The group could receive training in ways to support computing-based research and faculty members could recruit students for mentoring opportunities on their individual research projects. We will be hosting additional presentations in the coming months to further inform our students and faculty about all the exciting resources available for advancing research and innovation.”
“When I first became vice president, Dr. Forough Ghahramani was such a valuable resource and shared information about CC* grant opportunities. We decided on this grant and joined forces with three co-Principal Investigators including, Dr. David Klassen, Professor and Chair of College of Science and Mathematics; Dr. Nidhal Bouaynaya, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies; and Dr. Mira Lalovic-Hand, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. Our partner institutions are Rowan College at Burlington County (RCBC), Rowan College of South Jersey (RCSJ), and Stockton University. This project really began with Dr. Ghahramani and she was able to expand the list of potential resources, like the Eastern Regional Network (ERN), that Rowan could tap into as we develop our plan. Dr. Lalovic-Hand and her team have also been a committed part of the project since its inception from the grant writing stage, all the way through to the workshops and collecting feedback from presenters and participants.”
— Dr. Tabbetha Dobbins
Vice President for Research, Dean of the Graduate School
Rowan University
Developing a Coordinated Approach
When creating a CI strategy, many organizations focus predominantly on hardware and access to software, as well as the staff who will support these elements, but Dobbins says input from the administration is equally as important. “Our University’s administration will be involved in our focus group sessions to help determine how to allocate internal resources and to discuss the most suitable location for research computational support personnel within our organization. As we begin to put the CI plan together, we must determine how the overhead return from grants, for instance, are distributed to various units. If we need to change that formula so a slice of that funding goes to supporting future computational infrastructure, we would need university-level buy-in. We must create a robust financial model that doesn’t put computational research expenses entirely on the University or entirely on the researchers themselves. Creating this shared structure will be an important part of our discussions moving forward.”
After the survey and focus groups are completed and information is gathered from the seminar series, the group will begin writing the CI plan. “All of our data collection should be completed by August 2022,” says Dobbins. “The presentations may continue beyond that time, but the writing of the CI plan will take place between August and December of this year. The implementation of the CI plan, including financial support of CI and access to hardware and software, will be conducted at Rowan, but we hope to be a service to our community college affiliates and other regional universities and remove barriers for accessing state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure. Collaboratively, we can conduct larger scale transformative work and help more institutions to make a notable impact in data-driven computational research.”
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